By Amanda Anderson, a critical care nurse and graduate student in New York City currently doing a graduate placement at AJN.

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When I first started working as a nurse, I didn’t write much. My shifts, twelve hours of chaos, weren’t stories to be told, just days to survive. I wrote only when, after a traumatic event surrounding a patient’s death, I felt like I didn’t know who I could talk to about it. I had always written in a journal, but I hadn’t really thought of writing as a tool for healing—I just knew that I felt better after banging on the keyboard a bit.

Other than this single instance, I didn’t make writing a regular practice during my first year of nursing—a choice I still regret. I covet all of those forgotten lessons, missed descriptors, and stories that I might use in my writing now, but mostly, I wish I had known that moving my pen on a piece of paper might’ve helped me heal from the consistent stress of my new work.

A few years ago, by then a relatively experienced ICU nurse as well as a graduate student, I took a class called, “Writing, Communication, & Healing.” Taught by a poet and health care journalist, Joy Jacobson, it came at a time when I needed to learn how to […]